Johnny Clegg

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Jonathan Paul Clegg, OBE, OIS (7 June 1953 – 16 July 2019), a South African musician and anthropologist, was born in Johannesburg.

With Sipho Mchunu, he formed Juluka, the first group in South Africa apartheid history, with a white man and a black man.

They sang and performed, but later in a larger group.

Clegg formed Savuka in 1986 and later performed as a solo artist, occasionally reuniting with his former band members.

Le Zoulou Blanc (French: [l]] Occasionally named Le Zoulou Blanc (French: [l? zulu bl? — For "The White Zulu"), he was a pivotal figure in South African popular music and resistance to apartheid, with songs that blend Zulu with English lyrics and African music in a variety of Western styles.

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Early life and career

Clegg was born in Bacup, Lancashire, on June 7, 1953, to Dennis Clegg, an English father of Scottish descent, and Muriel, a Rhodesian mother, Muriel (Braudo). The mother of Clegg's mother was Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, and Clegg's Jewish upbringing, however, refusing to have a bar mitzvah or even associate with other Jewish children at school. His parents divorced as an infant and then migrated to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and later South Africa at the age of six, with his mother also spending part of a year in Israel during his childhood.

He lived in Johannesburg's northern suburbs as an adolescent, and discovered the Zulu migrant workers' music and dance. Clegg learned both the Zulu language and the maskandi guitar, as well as the migrants' isishameni dance styles by night under Charles Mzila's tutelage. Clegg's relationship with black musicians resulted in trespassing on government property and breaching the Group Areas Act. He was first arrested in South Africa at the age of 15 for breaking apartheid-era rules prohibiting people of different races from congregating together after curfew hours.

Sipho Mchunu, a Zulu migrant worker with whom he began performing music at the age of 16, met Sipho Mchunu. The relationship, which they dubbed Juluka, began in 1969 and was chronicled in the 1970s television documentary Beats of the Heart: A Time of Resistance.

After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Witwatersrand, Clegg's academic career began four years ago, where he lectured and wrote several seminal academic papers on Zulu music and dance. Clegg combined his music with the study of anthropology at Wits, where he was inspired by David Webster's work in the early stages of his musical career, who was later assassinated in 1989.

He began each song with snippets of Zulu history, literature, humor, and personal anecdotes that were relevant and unique to the song, occasionally even including elements of his Jewish roots in songs such as "Jericho," "Jarusalema," and "Warsaw 1943."

Juluka reunion and solo career

Clegg and Mchunu were reunited in the mid-1990s, and Juluka unveiled a new album and toured around the world in 1996 with King Sunny Adé. Clegg released several solo albums over the years.

He was joined onstage by South African President Nelson Mandela, who performed as Johnny Clegg, in the protest song "Asimbonanga" that Savuka had dedicated to Mandela during one of his appearances in 1999. Asimbonanga became a symbol of resistance for the Mass Democratic Movement's umbrella group, the United Democratic Front. During Mandela's illness and death in 2013, the concert footage in South Africa attracted significant media coverage.

Clegg's tour dates were postponed in 2017 after he underwent pancreatic cancer surgery, but he gave his last concert in Harare, Zimbabwe, in November 2018.

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